The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Feh. I haven't run across a time-traveler this toe-curlingly incompetent since the last time I read Connie Willis.

Promising start, irritating and disappointing everything else. I like steampunk, I like alternate history, I like historicals featuring famous people. This had all of the above going for it . . . and proceeded to make them all deeply obnoxious. This doesn't just feature Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, Jim, not the actor), it scrapes up every godforsaken contemporary of his and shoehorns each one into an awkward bit part. And don't get me started on the steampunk alt history. I will accept a lot of absurd things in this genre without a blink, but that's from books with the sense to smile and handwave. This book gives an exact date for historical divergence, and a mechanism, and an explanation for the alternative track science takes. And when you do that, you open yourself up to me looking at your explanation, laughing myself sick, and then going, "wait . . . you weren't kidding? Seriously? . . . Oh."

It's steampunk, kids. Do not explain it. It will not end well.



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Intuition by Allegra goodman

Intuition by Allegra Goodman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


One of those where I can rattle off a whole long list of good things about this book and Goodman's talent, but my face would still be going '…eh' the entire time. Watch:

The story of a cancer research lab and what happens when one researcher calls shenanigans on the extraordinary results of her colleague. An intensely interpersonal web, where it's not about the conflict and who is right and what the truth is, but instead about these personalities in this high-pressure mixing bowl. It's a book about science by way of being 95% about people -- about their screwups and jealousies and intuitions and desires and money and patience and breaking points. About how that makes science go as much as truth does. The writing has that lucid, pane-of-freshly-scrubbed-glass quality, if you know what I mean. It's not that this book is sympathetic to each conflicting point-of-view. It bypasses that to something more straightfaced and real and tangled. Sort of lifting the knot of people and squinting at it from every direction, watching it go, recording the data. One of the better executions of omniscient writing on a technical level I've seen in a long time.

It's all quite admirable and well-crafted and interesting.

And I just didn't care. Really at all. Shrug. I don't know, it just seems patently obvious to me that the practice of science is fundamentally no different than any other vocation or discipline: it ticks complexly and emotionally and interpersonally. Okay. Next.

I'd probably have cared if this was about a presidential campaign, though. So take that as you will.



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